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The Commons Aggregate and the Gift

A commons, generally speaking, is a living arrangement wherein humans interact via social, technical, and material networks to manage vital resources. It is a “paradigm [that] consists of working, evolving models of self-provisioning and stewardship that combine the economic and the social, the collective and the personal.”¹ According to historian Peter Linebaugh, “commons” is a widely misapplied term: “From the quaint village commons to the cosmic commons of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the medieval subsistence economy to the general intellect, no term has been simultaneously so ignored and so contentious.”² Natural commons refers to relatively unbounded resources such as water and aquatic ecologies; forests, jungles, and the animals that inhabit them; air and space; plants, seeds, and grain and their genetic makeup; wind that may be used for the harnessing of energy; and so on. By analogy, the cultural commons are customs, traditions, inventions, and the “vast store of unowned ideas [. . .] that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich.”³ As David Bollier underscores, however, “commons are not just things or resources. [. . .] A commons is a resource + a community = a set of social protocols.”⁴ This composite definition is especially instructive for my project, which uses theories of the natural and cultural commons to build a critically viable concept for studying the digital commons. Thinking with Bollier and others, I define a commons as a rhetorical aggregate comprised of three components: the commoners, the sites and networks of encounter, and the cultural resources with which the encounters are coordinated. With the phrase “rhetorical aggregate” I invoke a coordinated dynamic roughly akin to Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. As in the rhetorical situation, attention is directed toward rhetors’ responses to a contextual urgency. Rhetoric in an aggregate may be defined as the exertion of influence through the production and application of symbols. What the commons contributes conceptually is a sense of a continuous lived experience of cultural invention in a situated space.

THE NATURAL COMMONS

The context and management of the natural commons are best explained by telling the story of the English land enclosures.⁵ Since well before the Norman invasion, English commoners lived off the bounty of land that they did not own. They sustained themselves by grazing livestock, hunting and fishing, collecting firewood, and harvesting fruits and grains. As custodians of a natural, inhabited network, they were dependent on generally accessible goods, which they used according to specific privileges. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, modern commodification gradually turned common land into private property, segmenting the land for the emerging gentry class. An especially noteworthy moment occurred in 1532, when Henry VIII dissolved a number of monasteries, displacing the commoners who lived on the monasteries’ land. Throughout the seventeenth century formal law took over common law, and between 1725 and 1825 four thousand enclosure acts appropriated six million acres of land; many of those who had been commoners of the land became the laborers of burgeoning industry.⁶ In 1845 the General Inclosure Act affirmed the privatization of England’s land and natural resources, necessitating a redefinition not only of ownership but of social hierarchies and ways of life. Those who had kept themselves and their families alive by applying the knowledge they had of how to use the resources around them had to acquire other kinds of knowledge; they learned skills that were different from those that their communities had transmitted generationally for centuries. In short, the expertise of the commons networks was at least in part replaced by the expertise required by the new networks of industry.

Contrary to the often Edenic picture of village life is the dismal prognosis presented by Garett Hardin in 1968. His essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” inspired by an 1832 pamphlet written by amateur mathematician William Forster Lloyd, argued that nothing trumps human greed. Hardin summarily rejected the idea of sustainable governance beyond private ownership. The tragedy, according to Hardin’s dystopia, is that rational choice is selfish. In his widely cited pasture example Hardin writes,

Picture a pasture open to all. [sic] A rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. [sic] Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush. [sic] Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.⁷

Hardin’s point is that relying on self-restraint is irrationally self-destructive in the long run. The commons is unsustainable as a way of life because individuals cannot be trusted to tend to the interests of others as well as their own. The common good has no sincere proponents. And despite the endless refutations with which Hardin’s polemic has been met, it continues to prompt discussion, perhaps because Hardin-type individuals and their grubby hands are ubiquitous. If you tell someone that you are writing a book about the commons, what most will respond is, “Oh, as in the tragedy of the commons?” The phrase accompanies the idea.⁸

Of the scholars who have critiqued Hardin and attempted to disarm the notion of a looming tragedy, the most prominent is the Nobel prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom, whose legacy is “the Bloomington School” of commons scholarship, identified a set of design principles that distinguish the successful management of common pool resources. Having studied commons in fisheries and pastures in various places in the world, Ostrom’s response to Hardin and other proponents of privatization is that a custodial model is empirically viable. In Governing the Commons, she calls this model “Game 5,” wherein participants develop a contract of resource usage that is enforced by an appointed arbiter.⁹ Those who depend on the resources reach an agreement based on the information available to them. As Ostrom notes, lamenting the widespread support for a coercive government or corporate authority:

Unfortunately, many analysts—in academia, special interest groups, governments, and the press—still presume that common-pool problems are all dilemmas in which the participants themselves cannot avoid producing suboptimal results, and in some cases disastrous results. [. . .] Instead of presuming that some individuals are incompetent, evil, or irrational, and others are omniscient, I presume that individuals have very similar limited capabilities to reason and figure out the structure of complex environments.¹⁰

Ostrom’s work demonstrates that the notion of unmanaged commons, as Hardin might call them, is misleading, even oxymoronic.¹¹ The pasture is never entirely open. Common pool resources are governed by rules and norms that are enforced by variously elected community leaders. They are “stinted.”¹² The authority of leaders is assured by consent, which naturally entails conflict and continuous negotiation.¹³ The networks of the commons are maintained by the participants’ adherence to explicit and implicit codes; this adherence assures the endurance of the networks. Codes are in effect even when the networked interactions and the products thereof seem chaotic. When this is not the case, the commons falters and requires repair.

Because the Norman Conquest was a long time ago, and the Alanya inshore fisheries of Ostrom’s research are remote, it is helpful to bring the natural commons closer to home, connecting it to my project here and now. Specifically, before proceeding to the next section on the cultural commons I highlight a few ways in which the natural commons directly informs my analysis of digital rhetorical networks and processes. First, it is significant that the boundaries of ownership and access in the natural commons are negotiated continuously rather than through a one-time purchase, and that this negotiation happens through the symbols and practices of the commons rather than through the markers of official authority. As Linebaugh explains, undeterred English commoners persisted with their customs for centuries after the enclosure movement. Indeed, the example of so-called perambulations illustrates this point: long after the privatization of English common lands had begun, the commoners would ceremoniously walk along the perimeters of their territories, walk through the invisible lines dictated by parchment maps, and walk on the grounds where their families had long lived.¹⁴ These perambulations were a rhetorical negotiation of ownership and access. They entailed potentially hostile conflict and an enactment of rights, expectations, and motives through spatial and generational networks. To fully appreciate this practice, we might envision a group of commoners walking through the damp chill of spring and coming upon a fence in the middle of a field, a limit that previously was not there. What do they do? What should they think? As Hyde notes, the annual tradition of the walkabout did not become subversively defiant until legal edicts began to inscribe the land with property regulation.¹⁵ At that time, the physical act of moving through a network (of fields) was a way of establishing belonging: what belonged to whom and who belonged where. In the networks of the natural commons (as in the networks of the digital commons, which I get to later in the chapter), proprietary rights are not managed by a single buy-and-sell transaction, despite the best laid plans of mice and kings. Rather, the relationship between commoners and ownership is constituted through living habits.¹⁶

Second, it is significant for my study of the commons that the distinction in the natural commons between labor time and not-labor time is indeterminate, as commoners are continuously engaged in some form of production. One may think of it this way: in a village, commoners work continuously to make the things that sustain life, such as shelter, tools, and food. There is no “on the clock” or “off the clock” in terms of labor, nor are there clearly distinguishable places of labor and leisure. The products that are made in the evening hours (such as knitted socks or sharpened knives) are not worth less than the products that are made between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. All production is part of the livelihood of the commons. By contrast, laborers in an industrial setting may only be said to be working per se when they are at work in the factory, plant, or office. In this context, not-labor is the activity that happens in the not-workplace, which is to say at home or in establishments of social pleasure. Moreover, the indistinction of labor and not-labor in the natural commons must be correlated with governance. As Bollier explains with reference to historical industrialization, “One of the lesser-noticed aspects of enclosures was the separation of production and governance. In a commons, both were part of the same process, and all commoners could participate in both. After enclosures, markets took charge of production and the state took charge of governance.”¹⁷ I underscore this point about productive labor, time, and access to governance in the natural commons to explain that when we think of the continuous labor of village commoners from centuries ago, we might also think of today’s digital commoners, whose productivity is similarly continuous. The latter are engaged in digitally organized labor not just from nine to five but most of the time. This labor takes place not only at the office but in domestic and social venues: on the couch or at the coffee shop. Thus far, the analogy make sense. What is perhaps more complicated, and receives more attention in chapters 2 and 4, is the issue of managerial control. Bollier argues that productive commoners of the pre-enclosure time were involved actively in the governance of the commons. In later chapters I explore the extent to which this may apply to the decision-making procedures and power negotiations of the digital commons.

Third, the natural commons are relevant to my study of the digital commons insofar as they thrive on a rhetorical tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the mundane and the mysterious. Put differently, the commons are conditioned by a dialectic of what is readily known and what is potentially knowable. This is so in the past and present, and in the natural as well as the digital. Regarding the familiar, perhaps it goes without saying that the commons are common. They are routinized and dependent on predictability. In the natural commons, village life contains few surprises and plenty of well-worn habits. In the digital commons, routines are both mathematical, which is to say algorithmic, and human; most of us execute the chores of everyday life through communication technologies. At the same time, however, the natural commons are liminal, shaped by a boundary separating cultivated space from wilderness.¹⁸ In the uncharted, unmapped territory of the forest, ocean, and outer space, there is no telling what mysteries may dwell, exceeding or resisting human control. We the commoners watch these knowable phenomena from our windows, looking into the deep woods, the dark sky, or the World Wide Web. The commons and their unboundedness thus stimulate the imagination and beckon rhetorical invention. In the digital commons the mystery hides somewhere deep in the machine. In the inaccessible paths of the electronic networks, certain functions exceed the knowledge of most digital commoners. We who know precious little about the networked machines and their impenetrable languages are as mystified by them as the village commoners were by the idea of wood nymphs and krakens.

This dialectical feature of the natural commons is important for my analysis because delineating what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, or moving the line such that what was unfamiliar becomes familiar, is a rhetorical act of expertise. It is to make something known or knowable, to invent something in such a way that it is intelligible. It is to explain something, such as the movements of stars or the binary code of a computer program, so that we commoners understand: to make known and to give. This is a process of invention designed both to demystify and to maintain enough mystery that the expert remains necessary for the common good; for without some measure of mystery, the commoners would not need explanation from an authority figure. The mystery that exists at the periphery of the commons, like a horizon against which the commons may know itself, is significant not only for the commoners’ experience of everyday life but also for the identification and appointment of authority figures, the function of which is to make things known.

THE CULTURAL COMMONS

Reflecting on the vast concept of the cultural commons, it is helpful to begin with something concrete. In 1963 the Walt Disney Corporation released an animated film titled The Sword in the Stone, loosely based on the legend of King Arthur and the sword Excalibur. The film depicts a young boy, a wise old wizard with a pet owl, and a critical moment in which the boy rises to a challenge to fulfill his destiny. In short, the film is generic. Its narrative is familiar even to those who have not seen it. With this film as a starting point, my introduction of the cultural commons could go in various directions. For example, I might treat the film as a specific fixation of a perennial idea and discuss the implications for commercial copyright; this discussion would address how long Disney’s exclusive privileges ought to last, the value of the public domain, and where art and commerce meet for the good of society. These matters, which reappear throughout the book, are not the place to begin with the cultural commons as such, particularly when the issue at stake is expertise. Instead, my consideration of what constitutes the cultural commons and where they might be found begins with the notion of inspiration. Despite the unsettling sentimentality of the word, the metaphor itself of in-spiration helps me make my point. The cultural commons are, among other things, in the air. That is precisely why questions of property sometimes get awkwardly stuck. The Sword in the Stone is indeed copyrighted material, but it is also an iteration of a deeply rooted and pervasive myth. The myth of a noble hero, a fated journey, and the powerful object that only the hero can wield—sometimes it is a sword, but it might just as well be a ring (Frodo Baggins), a lamp (Aladdin), or a wand (Harry Potter)—is remade again and again. It hovers in the space of inspiration. Thus, it is misleading to speak of the cultural commons primarily as a question of who owns what.¹⁹

The most readily graspable and widely used definition of the cultural commons relies on analogy with the natural commons, comparing air and land to traditions, customs, and inventions. This way of thinking, which preserves the notion of inspiration and its centrality in cultural life, indicates how the natural and the cultural commons both consist of commoners, resources, and networks or sites. Or, as I explained with reference to Bollier, “Commons = resources + community + the rules and norms for managing them.”²⁰ On each side of the analogy are resources that belong to no one in particular but are vital to all and must be governed sustainably if they are to remain common. Otherwise they become the private possessions of whoever is in charge. Ownership thus enters the conversation not solely via property, including the relatively young concept of intellectual property, but as a structure of governance. Governance and property together make it possible to think of enclosures as applicable to both the natural and cultural commons. As I explained in the preceding section, the natural commons globally have been and continue to be enclosed, which is to say privatized. This is the case not only for land but also increasingly for scientific discoveries, species (including plants with pharmaceutical properties), and biological materials (including components of the human genome). In terms of the cultural commons, the much-cited argument of legal scholar James Boyle is that presently a “second enclosure movement” is under way. With respect to the distribution of cultural content, Boyle argues that intangible resources like ideas and facts are being enclosed as the English moors once were: “Things that were formerly thought of as common property, or as ‘uncommodifiable,’ or outside the market altogether, are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights.”²¹ In Boyle’s view, the second enclosure movement is driven by a “deep pessimism about the possibility of managing resources that are either commonly owned or owned by no one.”²² Like Ostrom, Boyle is convinced that those who see privatization as the only way to manage common pool resources are cynical, and that cynicism limits opportunities to develop commons governance.²³

When scholars and activists analogize the cultural and natural commons, the distinguishing feature that is most often mentioned is “nonrivalrous” resources. These are resources that are not diminished by use. They are difficult to contain, or “nonexcludable,” but there is no urgent need to contain them because they are not at risk of depletion. As Hardin’s pasture example illustrates, natural commons are finite, at least when they are not managed sustainably; where one sheep has eaten all the grass, less grass remains for others. If I fish all the cod out of the North Atlantic, precious little remains for future fishermen. By contrast, if I teach a song that I have composed to a friend, my song is not depleted. This comparison of fish and songs is, of course, complicated by market value, which I address in later chapters. For now, the point is that comparisons between the natural and cultural commons often hinge on the issue of what is finite and valuable. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who compare “the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty” with “knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects,” write, “When I share an idea or image with you, my capacity to think with it is not lessened; on the contrary, our exchange of ideas and images increases my capacities.”²⁴ This is the leitmotif of the open access movement and, in a larger historical context, the Enlightenment. At stake in nonrivalry is whether a resource multiplies and migrates from its point of origin or stagnates and dies. Most commentaries on the cultural commons, especially those that encourage resistance against “the second enclosure,” emphasize that ideas thrive when they are accessible to all, when commoners breathe the open air of inspiration, as previously suggested.

It is remarkable, however, that alongside the concept of the cultural commons as nonrivalrous is the recurring, albeit suppressed, suggestion that the cultural commons may be threatened from within, indeed by the commoners themselves. From the outside, enclosures threaten natural and cultural commons insofar as they turn shared resources into privately owned commodities. Commoners cannot gain access to what has been bought up by a private entity, whether it is land or copyrighted music. Further, natural commons are threatened by excessive use because they are rivalrous. When the fish are gone, they’re gone for good. But in discourses about the nonrivalrous cultural commons and the generative effect of sharing ideas, there is often an implied urgency to organize and protect. Not everyone is thrilled about the idea of the cultural commons as a repository from whence everyone may draw and into which anyone may make a deposit. The concern is quality control, and the risk that the cultural commons may, as Hardt and Negri fear, be “drained.”²⁵ Marxist historian David Harvey cautions that while the cultural commons “cannot be destroyed through use, it can be degraded and banalized through excessive abuse.”²⁶ What, one wonders, does he mean by abuse? What interests are served by the argument, which extends far beyond Harvey, that even in the cultural commons there are, or should be, standards and order, or by the argument that even in the cultural commons not “everything goes”; rather, someone is in charge? Framing this line of inquiry in terms of expertise allows me in later chapters to analyze how value and authority (or authorship) are managed via a logic of gifting, the gifting logos.

In rhetorical theory, the cultural commons enter through the concept of commonplaces. Most simply, we may think of the aforementioned stuff of the cultural commons—the ideas, artifacts, inventions, and knowledges—as necessary equipment for any persuasive effort. The cultural commons as Boyle defines them, in other words, supply rhetors with strategies for making arguments. Classically conceived, commonplaces, or koinoi topoi, are general resources for discovery and creativity, wherein rhetors formulate messages with regard to audiences’ “habits of thought, value hierarchies, forms of knowledge, and cultural conventions.”²⁷ Aristotle famously lists twenty-eight of them in the second book of the Rhetoric, noting how speakers’ effectiveness depends on their capacity to innovate within the structure of what is well established. The trick to persuasion is to turn the common and obvious toward a novel insight; here we get the notion of a trope, which turns an argument as needed. In the process of innovation, the commonplaces give rise to rhetorical artifacts and performances. They are productive methods, indeed forms that continue to be useful for as long as they are relevant. Put another way, the forms of the commonplaces are nonrivalrous. Aristotle’s inventory of general topics demonstrates how rhetors might persuasively mobilize the audience’s sense of consequences, antecedents, and various dialectical relationships such as more and less, past and future, possible and impossible. Commonplaces are the rhetorical opportunities of the cultural commons.²⁸

Another term in classical rhetorical theory that instructively connects the cultural commons with commonplace arguments is doxa. In Plato’s scornful definition, doxa, from dokein (how something appears), refers to the superficial beliefs of the public. It is indeed the purview of rhetoric, but to Plato, this is a bad thing. Doxa is distinct from episteme, or knowledge that is absolutely true rather than popular or common. From the beginning, thus, the commonness of doxa presses against questions of epistemology and what commoners may be said to know. Aristotle rehabilitates doxa with endoxa, which in his study of the Topics extends beyond the fickle whims of the people to more enduring beliefs and consensus.²⁹ Because I am concerned with commons expertise, Mari Lee Mifsud’s treatment of doxa in terms of cultural “givens” is especially instructive, and I turn to it in the case studies that follow. As Mifsud explains, doxa are the givens of a particular community; references to doxa pass without critical reflection.³⁰ Doxa are the assumptions that are taken for granted, the knowledge or wisdom that is smoothly, even imperceptibly transmitted. We might think, for example, of a garden variety idiom and how it contains a kernel of common epistemology: “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch!” says the wise elder to the impatient youth. And the idiom proves him right. To say that idioms are commonplaces is to note that they are places in which one might discover the knowledge of the commons. What is commonly known may then be referenced among commoners, prompting us to say to one another, “There goes that guy who counted his chickens,” when we see the man who bought a Tesla at the first indication that his start-up company was going to take off. Doxa, put differently, constitute the theoretical context for studying the rhetoric of expertise in the commons, digital or otherwise. They are nimble, productive, effective, and as subtle or brash as they need to be.

As I take certain insights from the preceding sections on the natural and cultural commons, transitioning with them to the following section on the digital commons, I am compelled to emphasize emplacement. That is, the cultural commons are situated in particular places in the world. These places shape the cultural commons in fundamental ways. My own experience illustrates this, but in offering it anecdotally, my assumption is that the reader will supplement my story with his and her own. I grew up in Sweden, where traditions that reference light and dark are synchronized with seasonal rhythms. Advent, for example, falls at a time of year when most waking hours are wrapped in deep darkness. In this circumstance, lighting candles that signify hope and life against death and placing them in the liminal space of windows, where a thin glass pane separates cold and dark from warmth and light, is a way of culturing nature. Or, we might say, the cultural and natural commons interlace. Likewise, in the summertime the Swedish Midsummer pagan rituals play on the meanings of light and darkness, specifically the endurance of light. Midsummer is a major holiday that incorporates the natural commons, casting certain characters like the forest in myths and songs. Reflecting historically on the cultural commons of Midsummer, it is easy to imagine how, before electrical lighting, celebrants might spot fairies in the midnight haze against the tree line. Less romantically put, the living practices of commoners connect the natural and cultural commons in networked forms. What remains to be seen in the next section, and throughout the book, is how digital sites constitute these forms.

THE DIGITAL COMMONS

The term digital commons carries an idealistic connotation. It prompts many of us to think of the open access movement, or academic and public institutions that make their holdings publicly available. In order to critically complement rather than oppose this perspective, I align the digital commons with the natural and cultural commons, not because the three are neatly analogous or distinct but because significant conceptual insights may be drawn from multiple disciplines in order to examine the aggregate form of the digital commons. My contention with this alignment is that, when we study the digital commons from the point of view of commons theory generally, we are able to see certain facets of the aggregate that are important for rhetorical analysis. Thus, I define the digital commons in terms of three components: humans, networks, and resources. The humans, articulated via the formation that Paolo Virno calls “the multitude,” populate and constitute the networks. The networks are both electronic and social; they are, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, infrastructural. In the networks, the multitude engages in productive interactivity, inventing digital artifacts, or stuff, for circulation. In so doing, the multitude governs itself and its resources. In the following paragraphs I explain this definition of the digital commons with respect to the three key concepts.

Multitude

Paolo Virno’s theory of the multitude is an illuminating way to think of social being in the digital commons. For Virno, the multitude is a network that produces individuals rather than the other way around. Or, as he writes, singularities are the point of arrival following a process of individuation: “The individual of the multitude is the final stage of a process beyond which there is nothing else, because everything else (the passage from the One to the Many) has already taken place.”³¹ Taking this position on the individual and the network, the singular and the multitude, Virno begins by recasting the contention between Spinoza and Hobbes on political structures. Hobbes rejects the multitude, Virno explains, because it fails to achieve the unity of a single will.³² For Spinoza, “the multitude indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion.”³³ The multitude remains politically and socially networked, not foregoing individuation but also not taking it as a prerequisite for collective action.³⁴ For this reason, the multitude is appropriate for analyzing the “associative life” of digital commoners. As I demonstrate in the case studies, the multitude convenes and disperses in productive pulsation through networks, less like the languid motion of a jelly-fish than like the rapid flutter of an embryonic heartbeat. In this pulsation, the multitude functions as a name for the digital commoners. I turn to Virno’s theory because it affords a useful vocabulary for rhetorical analysis. As he notes, “an entire gamut of considerable phenomena—linguistic games, forms of life, ethical inclinations, salient characteristics of production in today’s world—will end up to be only slightly, or not at all, comprehensible, unless understood as originating from the mode of being of the many.”³⁵ In the digital commons, “the coupling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own [;] they are gasping for air, burning themselves out.”³⁶

As Virno explains, the multitude coheres around “formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games.’”³⁷ It meets on common ground, in other words—specifically the common ground of language itself, which belongs to everybody.³⁸ Thus, the multitude functions through what Virno refers to as the “general intellect” and what I might describe as the cultural commons within the digital commons. With this description, I am drawing attention to how the aggregate of the digital commons (humans, networks, and resources) encompasses the cultural commons, as well as to how the cultural commons exceed the structure of digital networks. The cultural commons necessarily establish the context for what happens in the digital commons. In addition, the cultural commons are called upon in the particular rhetorical actions of digital commoners, as endoxa is instantiated in particular appeals to rhetorical commonplaces (see previous discussion). Virno writes, “The unity which the multitude has behind itself is constituted by the ‘common places’ of the mind, by the linguistic-cognitive faculties common to the species, by the general intellect.”³⁹ Thus he connects the multitude with the commons. Using the notion of a general intellect, Virno identifies a central resource with which the multitude may rhetorically constitute itself (or, its “selves”); this creates the possibility for a rhetorical invention of the multitude in common practice. The informal knowledge and mindset of the multitude are the digital substances of networked life. Moreover, Virno indicates how the rhetoric of the general intellect animates the multitude. The general intellect is, in a word, the stuff of the commons.⁴⁰

Resources, or “Stuff”

The resources of the digital commons are like resources of the natural commons and the cultural commons in the sense that they sustain life, connecting commoners to one another. The resources are a heterogenous stratum layered on top of digital networks, which I address later in the chapter. As we think of land, air, and fish in the natural commons and ideas, artifacts, and traditions in the cultural commons, so may we think of resources in the digital commons as digitized “stuff.” The stuff, the material and symbolic artifacts of everyday life, is generated by digital commoners. Indeed, this productivity and its buildup of content and imprints are effects of the digital commons. The stuff is infrastructural and immersive, as webs are to the spiders who make them. As I demonstrate in chapter 2, the Creative Commons suite of licenses is designed to structure and tag creators’ stuff, such as music, text, photography, and software code. The licenses are the infrastructure of commons stuff. Similarly, chapter 3 explains how the archiving of digital stuff preserves a historical treasure for future generations, foreclosing the loss of culture. In chapter 4, the main campaign promise of the Pirate Party is common access to digital stuff. To be sure, the word “stuff ” is rather colloquial and lacking in academic authority. Nevertheless, it is suitable for an analysis of the digital commons. Its polysemy makes it user-friendly. Stuff could refer to personal property (as in “My basement is full of stuff ”) or a performance (as in “I like to strut my stuff”). Stuff can be stacked on shelves, but it can also be immaterial. As Boyle puts it, focusing on an internetworked context, “If you can make it somehow into the public consciousness, then you can be paid for allowing the world to copy, distribute, and perform your stuff.”⁴¹ Similarly putting the emphasis on material impact, Brian Ott explains, “It matters, in every sense of that word, that digital data and information is made up of bytes rather than atoms, that it is comprised of binary code, that traditional modes of communication (sound and image) can, regardless of medium (radio, television, newspaper, book, music, etc.), be converted to digital form.”⁴² Digital form, in a word, is stuff; the form is binary, distinguishable in two states of either off or on, 1 or 0.⁴³

Employing Virno’s concept of the multitude’s general intellect and the notion of digitized stuff as the resources of the digital commons, Boyle’s aforementioned concern about a second enclosure becomes salient. It is a matter not only of privatizing knowledge, mindsets, and languages, but also of technically restricting the networks of the digital commons as lands might be restricted by fences. In the digital context, the cultural commons are bound not only by copyright laws but by the technologies that enforce them. As prominent scholars of intellectual property have argued, the same technologies that enable cultural creativity and innovation are used by the legal interests of copyright holders to enforce monopolies, threatening the vibrancy of the digital and cultural commons. According to “free culture” advocate Lawrence Lessig, “Technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.”⁴⁴ Lessig argues that the content industry, what we might think of as pop culture media, has abused its political influence to legally erase the divide between regulated commercial use of copyrighted material and private noncommercial use.⁴⁵ This is relevant for my study of the digital commons in the same way that any appropriation, regulation, or enclosure would constrain other kinds of commons. At stake is the prospect of producing life-sustaining things and circulating them, or making them part of the commons network, the multitude’s connectivity.

Networks

The infrastructure of the digital commons is a network of networks, what Manuel Castells defines as a “set of interconnected nodes [. . .] powered by microelectronics-based information and communication technologies.”⁴⁶ Although this infrastructure may be partially identified with the global network of shared protocols known as the internet, it also, more particularly, connects situated content and practices. (For example, I later characterize the Creative Commons licenses as a commons infrastructure for the copyright negotiations of the World Wide Web.) In theory and practice, the purpose of a network is to sustain itself by carrying out a program that systematizes norms and codes. Because this is so, networks have an important function in any commons (digital or natural). In the natural commons of Ostrom’s fisheries, a central objective is the longevity of the fish colonies. Networks coordinate the resources (the fish) and the participants. In the digital commons, the network’s purpose may be more nebulous. Castells writes, “The culture of the global network society is a culture of protocols of communication enabling communication between different cultures on the basis, not necessarily of shared values, but of sharing the value of communication. This is to say: the new culture is not made of content but of process.”⁴⁷ The question, then, is how the process may be understood. My intention is to demonstrate that the networked process of the digital commons may be understood as a productive epistemic habit. This habit, in which making stuff and knowing stuff are integrated, is identified by the networked participants as expertise. Furthermore, in this logic (or logos) of expertise, gifting is essential. As Castell notes, “The culture of the network society is a culture of protocols of communication between all cultures in the world, developed on the basis of a common belief in the power of networking and of the synergy obtained by giving to others and receiving from others.”⁴⁸ Network theory supports attention to the rhetorical processes of expertise as knowing, making, and gifting.

One of the most important aspect of the networked structure of the digital commons is that the electronic network itself is built for accreting exchanges between peripheral nodes. It is built for production among peer participants.⁴⁹ Thus, the digital commons, like the natural and cultural commons, depend on the ingenuity and rhetorical invention of the commoners. This aspect of digital networks is elucidated well by Yochai Benkler, whose widely cited analysis of the information economy traces “the emergence of nonmarket individual and cooperative production.”⁵⁰ Benkler claims that after 150 years of an industrial paradigm, two features now distinguish the advanced economies of the twenty-first century: a shift toward the production and manipulation of information and an extensive communication network with high computational capabilities.⁵¹ As he assesses the long-term prospects of this cooperative production, Benkler argues that the network society “provides a platform for new mechanisms for widely dispersed agents to adopt radically decentralized cooperation strategies other than by using proprietary and contractual claims to elicit prices or impose managerial commands.”⁵² For my purposes, Benkler is informative in his attention to the habits with which “individuals pool their time, experience, wisdom, and creativity to form new information, knowledge, and cultural goods”—in other words, the networked habits of knowing and making.⁵³ Moreover, while Benkler’s interest in economic mechanisms differs from my interest in rhetorical practice, his discussion of nonmarket agents opens rich possibilities for studying goods and the management of value beyond the industrial paradigm. He indicates ways of exploring how people make things and how things acquire value through logics that may, without the concept of the network society, be elusive.

A few words of clarification are appropriate at this juncture. First, the network society is not synonymous with the digital commons as I understand it. The infrastructure of the digital commons functions as a network, but the digital commons exceed this infrastructure. By comparison, it would be odd to reduce the natural commons to the infrastructure of space, spatial relations, and physical movement. Relatedly, the internet, which is a network of networks, is not the digital commons. It is not, in its current form, a commons in any effective sense, including though not limited to the sense of shared property and governance. From the early years of the 1990s, the policies that determined internet expansion and access were dictated largely by the private sector. As Benkler notes with reference to the Bill Clinton administration’s telecommunications programs, corporate interests shaped the internet into a market structure from the beginning, in which “property-like regulatory frameworks” were strengthened while “various regulatory constraints on property like rights” were eased.⁵⁴ Whether this history is good or bad is beyond the scope of my project; the same goes for the question of whether the internet or the World Wide Web could, in terms of ownership structures, become a “real” commons in the future. It seems, to me, unlikely. What I am concerned with as a rhetorical scholar are the habits of language, which in the case of the digital commons invent a form of being together digitally. In part, my reason for drawing conceptual insights from the natural and cultural commons is that doing so allows me to study the digital commons not solely as a function of property, but as a living arrangement. As a living arrangement, the digital commons are constituted by the commoners, the cultural productivity in which they are engaged, and the networks through which they are connected.

For rhetorical scholars, digital networks have in recent years acquired a new inflection and prominence. According to Damien Smith Pfister, “The changing conditions of mediation merit the development of a ‘new rhetoric’ capable of guiding public advocacy and deliberation in contemporary times. Networked media spur networked rhetorics.”⁵⁵ In his study of the blogosphere, Pfister explicates a historical “shift in sensibilities as people participate in, make sense of, and enact new modes of thinking, feeling, and being.”⁵⁶ As he carefully notes, however, the network has long been “rhetoric’s key metaphor,” connecting rhetors and audiences via paths of influence.⁵⁷ In terms of the value of the concept of network for the study of digital rhetoric, Pfister and I agree. What is especially compelling is how he mobilizes the rhetorical tradition to study “how the affordances provided by networked media change practices related to the invention of public argument, the role of emotion in public life, and the exercise of expertise.”⁵⁸ And yet the network concept on its own is necessary but insufficient for a study of digital rhetoric; that is, it is insufficient to function without a framing concept such as commons.⁵⁹ One of my reservations about the network as self-sufficient is that it tends to orient one’s imaginary and focus toward utilitarianism.⁶⁰ Networks function with a purpose, designed to execute. With some exceptions, networks have a greater potential for efficiency than commons do, and a higher aspiration for efficient processing, specifically information processing.⁶¹ It is difficult to conceive of a network in which figurative litter is simply lying around. Compared to the commons, networks have nodes rather than textured destinations. In the commons, including the digital commons, the multitude of commoners live with each other’s cultural residues. Networks do not necessarily contain a tradition or the products thereof. Commons, however, do.

As is by now evident, this book belongs in an interdisciplinary literature dedicated to digital rhetoric. As a rhetorical scholar rather than, for example, a media literacy critic, I take the term “digital rhetoric” to designate the practice and study of persuasion in the activities, objects, and sites of digital information technologies.⁶² Specifically, as my point of view is informed by theories and grammars of the classical canon, I join the conversation that Kathleen Welch pioneered twenty years ago, Collin Brooke mapped ten years after that, and many others have contributed to richly.⁶³ I wholeheartedly agree with Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister, who introduce their innovative collection of essays by noting, “Returning to ancient texts from new technocultural vantage points shakes up accepted interpretations, produces readings with different nuances, allows old terms to be revivified and reinhabited in new ways, and generates theoretical resources to guide critics, theorists, and publics in negotiating continuity and change.”⁶⁴ Further, I appreciate Aaron Hess and Amber Davisson’s dialectics of theory and analysis, whereby they emphasize that “the concept of digital rhetoric requires sustained attention to the ways that rhetoric changes in a technological era and how technology is shaped by human expression both about and through the technology itself.”⁶⁵ As Douglas Eyman notes, “Digital rhetoric should be viewed as a field that engages multiple theories and methods rather than as a singular theory framework.”⁶⁶ Responding to Barbara Warnick’s germinal work, Eyman explains that scholars of digital rhetoric “need to align theories and methods of classical and contemporary rhetoric to networked texts and new media as objects of study, but we also need to develop new theories and methods to account for gaps in these more traditional approaches.”⁶⁷ By inventing and deploying the concept of the gifting logos to examine discourses of expertise in the digital commons, I respond to the invitations extended by these scholars.

Scholars of digital rhetoric, as well theorists like Castells and Benkler, are explicitly wary of being charged with technological determinism, and for good reason. And because I, too, could be indicted on this charge, a comment is warranted. As the word “determinism” suggests, the idea is that mechanical, industrial, and communication technologies constrain and enable human habits and perspectives in ways that we ourselves do not control. To a point, this seems a fairly obvious assessment. A commuter train allows me to go faster than a car, but not as fast as a rocket ship. A telephone allows me to hear my friend’s voice, while a letter does not. The reason that the point of view known as technological determinism is so often rejected or even derided is that extreme versions of it tend to elide the human origins of technology. In scholarly analyses as well as popular discourse, technology at times is talked about as though it appeared out of nowhere, enveloping and dictating human life. This point of view is especially prominent at historical moments of innovation, such as at the introduction of the printing press, the steam engine, the incandescent light bulb, microprocessors, and the internet. In terms of information technologies and media specifically, tales of origin are often fervently optimistic, marking a moment of ingenuity after which people were brought closer together and communicated better than ever before.⁶⁸ The way the tales get recounted obscures not only the social context in which a technology is invented but the historical precedents thereof: the moments in the past when old technologies were new and characterized with the same enthusiasm as that with which the most recent technological invention is hailed.⁶⁹ To critics of technological determinism, the phrase “new media” and the revolutionary impact that enthusiasts predict allow a presentist interpretation of media and human practices.

Although I obviously agree that all inventions and technologies are produced in a social context, that “history matters,” and that hope springs eternal until it gives us amnesia, I submit that a brusque rejection of technological determinism sometimes exaggerates human agency and control over machines.⁷⁰ Of course we did not wake up one morning inside microelectronic networks and begin to produce culture there, conditioned by the technologies of the network and the machines in our midst. Instead, the networks were installed and continue to change, shrink, and grow as humans do things to them. But now that the networks are here, they do in fact shape life in the digital commons: not all the time, or in all matters, but significantly. To underestimate this process of impact is to overestimate the authority that humans exercise over the technologies of our lives, communicative and otherwise. As I look around my office, my home, and my city, it is evident that technology in some measure “determines” me. As Castells writes, “Our society is characterized by the power embedded in information technology, at the heart of an entirely new technological paradigm.”⁷¹ My concern is with the language in which that power is vested and with which it is negotiated in particular moments. Thus, I am cautious with my own tendency to reinforce the perspective of technological determinism, but because of what my project demands, I am compelled to recognize the rhetorical indicators of determination.

Before I proceed, it may be helpful to take stock of the chapter’s major points thus far. First, the digital commons are an aggregate of three components. The humans, articulated as a multitude of networked individuals, convene in the practices of rhetorical constitution; the immersive resources, or digital stuff that connect them, are incorporated in networked interaction and governance; and the networks of governance supply the infrastructure for productivity. Second, analyzing the digital commons with reference to the natural and cultural commons brings to light certain qualities of the aggregate that demand scholarly attention, specifically from rhetoricians. These qualities include situated experience in particular sites, the importance of inventive knowledge and lived experience in social relationships, and the boundary between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Third, rhetorical scholars, who have long studied commonplace argumentation and networked persuasion, have much to gain by deploying the commons as a critical concept for productive sociality. Doing so allows us to complement more familiar terms, such as public and audience. This opportunity is essential for scholars of digital rhetoric and also potentially useful and significant for others.

THE GIFT

Gifts are messages. That is to say, gifting is a rhetorical practice. It is an engagement between a giver-rhetor and a recipient-audience, mediated by a third substance. The gift-message may be as petty as “I did not forget to bring a gift” (see, for example, all birthday parties for children under five years old) or as vital as organ donation. In each case, the gift communicates. In this section I introduce five prominent thinkers who have responded to either the question “What is a gift?” or the slightly different “What functions does a gift serve?” In chronological order I highlight recurring themes in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, Martin Heidegger, Lewis Hyde, and Jacques Derrida. These thinkers’ commitments lie in the interstices of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, art, and economics. And insofar as they have shaped the very concept of the gift as we know it, one cannot write about gifting without giving due space and attention to each of their perspectives. I survey them here in order to identify certain insights that inform my rhetorical position on gifting. It is thus important that I begin with a declaration of my own assumption: gifts are messages. As I explain in the next section, which deals directly with the gifting logos, my concern is with the rhetoricity of gifting and with the presence of gifting rhetoric in activities that are typically thought of as unrelated to gifts. Operating from this position, I am relieved of the burden of determining whether there really is such a thing as a gift or whether one can really give or receive a true gift. Because gifts are messages—because gifting is a rhetorical practice—the determination must depend on the event of the message rather than on a transcendent, absolute standard.

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Curse of Wisdom (1883–1885)

In the parable of Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche theorizes the gift in two forms. From Zarathustra himself, who leaves his mountain and “goes under” to impart wisdom to humans, the gift of wisdom is unreceivable.⁷² Humans do not understand.⁷³ In response to Zarathustra’s unintelligible message, the people laugh; hating him, they treat him like a jester.⁷⁴ Lamenting this, Zarathustra asks himself, “They receive from me, but do I touch their souls?”⁷⁵ By definition, Zarathustra’s gift cannot be received. That this is so is reflected in the failure of his project, which ultimately does not generate a cohort of “overhumans.” The humans are unable to receive the gift they really need. They are incapable of grasping Zarathustra’s insight that gifted wisdom cannot be wisdom in any true sense. With reference to the tenth and sixteenth chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, Zarathustra exhorts his followers to “lose me and find yourselves.”⁷⁶ Nietzsche insists that the gift of wisdom cannot be received when wisdom is understood as a perspective on the folly of the social world.⁷⁷

Within the social world—this is the second form in which Nietzsche theorizes the gift—gifting is self-interested manipulation, driven by pride and shame. Giving gifts is a selfish drive in pursuit of the “gift-giving virtue” that puts in the eyes of the gifter a “goldlike gleam.”⁷⁸ That humans stuff themselves (with material or symbolic goods) so that gift-giving love can flow out of them as from a well is deeply selfish.⁷⁹ To help a person out of pity by bringing her a gift brings her only shame. Such charity turns into a “gnawing worm” of indebtedness.⁸⁰ In other words, regarding gifts within the social order, Nietzsche aligns with theorists who emphasize the political dictates of gifting. The saint who appears early in the story underscores the sociality of gifting, explaining to Zarathustra that people do not believe that hermits bring gifts since their “steps sound too lonely through the streets.”⁸¹ Givers of gifts are not lonely but belong in society. Important to note here, of course, is that to Nietzsche this belonging is deplorable, even nauseating.⁸² The overman might value friendship, but he does not stomach the collective.⁸³ And the gifts with which humans administer their pity and persuasion are efficacious only there.⁸⁴

Nietzsche’s theory of the gift in both forms explicated here posits desperation as a motive. Zarathustra’s impulse to give away his wisdom reflects how, as a cup that overflows, he “wants to become empty again,” which is to say that he “wants to become man again.”⁸⁵ With his gift still intact, he is something other than a man. His gift (of wisdom) is onerous, setting him aside from the humans. He is like a bee burdened with too much honey. The gift is a compulsion, however, and Zarathustra discovers that his wisdom cannot be received. He complains that his “happiness in giving died in giving.”⁸⁶ The humans’ system of gifts, as demonstrated in Zarathustra’s lectures, is inextricably tied to the meanings of virtue, which entail punishment, justice, and reward—all of which are learned from fools and liars.⁸⁷ Those who give do so in an effort to control the actions of those whom they pity. Those who receive begin to resent the experience of obligation. Givers and receivers alike, Nietzsche intimates, are drawn to and trapped in sociality. There, humans can actually wield gifts in a symbolically coherent way, in contrast to the wisdom-gift that Zarathustra offers. The trouble is that the ways in which they wield the wisdon gift only recommit them to good and evil.⁸⁸

Marcel Mauss: In Praise of the Noble Expenditure (1925)

In the most widely cited ethnography of gift exchange in “primitive”/“archaic” cultures, Marcel Mauss identifies the functions of gifting for the social order.⁸⁹ He examines gifting habits as the “total social phenomena” of the Samoan, Maori, Andaman, and Melanesian peoples, encompassing religious, moral, economic, and legal institutions. To trace the history and cultural force of these social phenomena, he relies on the concept of “prestations,” which indexes a protoeconomic arrangement “between clan and clan in which individuals and groups exchange everything between them.”⁹⁰ Within prestations, material objects circulate “side by side with the circulation of persons and rights.”⁹¹ Geographically distant cultures, Mauss demonstrates, rely on institutions that “reveal the same kind of social and psychological pattern. Food, women, children, possessions, charms, land, labor, services, religious offices, rank—everything is stuff to be given away and repaid.”⁹² As gifted stuff circulates, power is managed as “property and a possession, a pledge and a loan, an object sold and an object bought, a deposit, a mandate, a trust; for it [the gift] is given only on condition that it will be used on behalf of, or transmitted to, a third person, the remote partner.”⁹³ Gift exchange cultures, according to Mauss, depend on a circulation system that produces social capital.

The social capital generated by gift exchange may be understood in Mauss’s analysis as agglutinating and manipulative. The agglutination happens as prestations form internal and intergroup bonds. In addition, it happens as a function of the symbolic relationship between a gift and a giver, or donor. Mauss notes that in Maori culture, an object that is given away “still forms a part of” the donor, affording him or her “a hold over the recipient.”⁹⁴ Regarding the Brahminic law of Hindu cultures, Mauss explains, “Nowhere is the connection between the thing given and the donor, or between property and its owner, more clearly apparent than in the rules relating to gifts and cattle.”⁹⁵ Social hierarchies emerge through an exchange of gifted stuff, and participants articulate identities as a function not only of their relation to each other, or their efficacy within the exchange, but also of their personal relationship to stuff. Gift exchange, according to Mauss, allows prestations to manipulate one another in societies that “have not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market, sale proper, fixed price, and weighed and coined money.”⁹⁶ He writes, “The agonistic character of the prestation is pronounced. Essentially usurious and extravagant, it is above all a struggle among nobles to determine their position in the hierarchy.”⁹⁷

Notwithstanding the description of gift exchange as a struggle, Mauss’s project is optimistic, animated by what seems like either exoticism or nostalgia. He claims that modern societies, if they take heed of the lessons of a simpler place and time, may be on the precipice of realizing “a dominant motif long forgotten.”⁹⁸ Thankfully, we are not yet full fledged as “homo oeconomicus.”⁹⁹ Indeed, writes Mauss, “It is our good fortune that all is not yet couched in terms of purchase and sale.”¹⁰⁰ In a call to repentance, he insists, “We should come out of ourselves and regard the duty of giving as a liberty, for in it there lies no risk.”¹⁰¹ “We should return to the old and elemental,” he asserts, and rediscover “those motives of action still remembered by many societies and classes: the joy of giving in public, the delight in generous artistic expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in the public or private feast.”¹⁰² Mauss’s study, which set the tone for twentieth-century ethnographies of nonmonetary value systems, idolizes gifting. He places it in cultural systems that, for the reader, are impossibly far away. Still, he nostalgically orients those cultures toward the reader, making them exemplary rather than unintelligible.

Martin Heidegger: The Ereignis of Being (1962)

Martin Heidegger’s treatment of the gift appears in a publication that he completed late in life, having more or less abandoned the metaphysical ontology of his famous Being and Time.¹⁰³ In a 1962 lecture titled “Time and Being,” while “groping his way out of metaphysics,” Heidegger emphatically rejects the Western tradition that starts with Plato’s distinction between ideational forms and phenomena.¹⁰⁴ He critiques the idea of Being as presence, insisting that nowhere around us—nowhere around the lecture hall in which his audience is gathered—can Being be pointed to. Heidegger asks, “Is Being at all?”¹⁰⁵ To this grammatically constrained question, he responds that if matter is a thing that is, then neither time nor Being is matter.¹⁰⁶ So instead of saying “Being is,” which would characterize Being as a kind of situated, human matter, Heidegger lands on “There is Being.”¹⁰⁷ In the following paragraphs I rely on Indo-European semiotics to draw a path from Heideggerian Being to gifting.

In German, the phrase “there is” (es gibt) translates literally to “it gives.” For example, Es gibt eine Katze auf der Strasse means, “There is a cat in the street,” or more literally “It gives a cat in the street.” That the “it” that gives is not identical with the cat is indicated by the genus: neuter for the “it” and feminine for the cat. In Latin, Heidegger notes about two-thirds of the way into his lecture, the predicate pluit, the present-tense third-person singular of the verb “to rain” (pluere), takes no subject.¹⁰⁸ In Latin, it isn’t that “It rains,” in other words. There is no “it” that rains. There is only “Rains!” This expression in English, however, is unintelligible to the point of being obscure. The question is, What is it that rains? What rains? The reader who is thinking “Rain rains” is on the right track. This insight is helpful in the following transition from weather to Being. In Heidegger’s phrase “There is Being,” the “there is” (es gibt) must be translated as “it gives.” “There is Being” and “It gives Being” are synonymous. “It gives Being” is the statement that brings gifts and gifting into Heidegger’s lifelong project.

The three-pronged assertion that “It gives Being” raises at least three questions. First, what “it” is the subject? Who or what is acting in the phrase? In pursuit of this question, Heidegger cautions his audience not to resort to the implied divinity of a metaphysical supposition. There is no higher “indeterminate power” that bestows life upon humanity and then sits back to observe.¹⁰⁹ Second, what is given? What is the substance of the gift? In response, Heidegger brings together the first and second questions, suggesting that we stop thinking of “Being as the ground of beings,” and instead focus our attention on the giving.¹¹⁰ It is not that Being as some immaterial substance (such as God) gives life on the planet (i.e., being with a lowercase b) to humans. Rather, what gives and what is given is Being. Heidegger writes, “As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving. As a gift, Being is not expelled from giving.”¹¹¹ Or, to reference the earlier grammatical excursion of “Rains!” (as opposed to “It rains”), “Gives!”

Developing the idea of “Gives!” and asking a third question—Where, or how, does the giving take place (or time)?—I turn to the concept that Heidegger discusses toward the end of the lecture: appropriation. With this concept, Heidegger suspends the term that is “simply too bogged down with metaphysical connotations” and offers what editor and translator Joan Stambaugh calls an “activity.”¹¹² Appropriation is an event (Ereignis); it is not an event or the event of a singular occurrence so much as it is that occasion is a possibility. When Heidegger explains appropriation as allowing time and Being to “belong together,” he characterizes appropriation as a condition of “eventing.”¹¹³ This eventing, specifically, is a gifting event: “Giving and its gift receive their determination from Appropriating.”¹¹⁴ The “it” in “It gives Being” is appropriation, which is to say that the “it” is not a presence but an event that enables “the realm in which presence is extended.”¹¹⁵ In appropriation, then, Being “vanishes.”¹¹⁶ Again, there is no “it” that like an immanent divinity watches its gift from afar. “It” is neither revealed nor remnant after the giving. Indeed, “after” the giving misconstrues the event as such. Heidegger notes that in the giving, “the sending source keeps itself back and, thus, withdraws from unconcealment.”¹¹⁷ He concludes by discarding the idea that appropriation either “is” or “is there”; instead, “appropriation appropriates.”¹¹⁸ Or indeed, “Rain rains.” In English, it would make no sense to say that Being “be’s.” The present tense, the realm of what is present, demands that a translation move “to be” into the realities of “is.” But if we were to tentatively permit the phrase “Being bes,” then a way to explain the nature of that act or event would, in reference to Heidegger, be as gifting. To Heidegger, the gift is the event of Being. Moreover, this event must by necessity concern us beings. It gives all the “There is” around us, as we are the “constant receiver[s] of the gift given by the ‘It gives present.’”¹¹⁹

Lewis Hyde: Artistic Talent (1983)

Lewis Hyde uses the notion of a gift to theorize the relationship between art and artists and between artists and their audience. He embraces the gift’s affordance of social connectivity and authenticity, referencing various gift-exchange cultures, including the ones studied by Marcel Mauss.¹²⁰ To Hyde, art begins with inspiration, the “initial stirring of the gift.”¹²¹ The individual inspiration to make art is “a gift [that] we do not get by our own efforts.”¹²² Art, then, depends on the artist’s gift both in the sense of artistic talent and in the sense of a core substance from which art emerges. Hyde writes, “All artists work to acquire and perfect the tools of their craft, and all art involves evaluation, clarification, and revision. But these are secondary tasks. They cannot begin (sometimes they must not begin) until the materia, the body of the work, is on the page or on the canvas.”¹²³ The gift involved in artistry, in other words, is “stuff”; the gift-stuff is molded and perfected in accordance with the artist’s gift-as-talent.¹²⁴ This inventive process, to Hyde, is enigmatic and excessive. He notes, “A gift—and particularly an inner gift, a talent—is a mystery. We know what giftedness is for having been gifted, or for having known a gifted man or woman. We know that art is a gift for having had the experience of art.”¹²⁵ Through the experience of art, artists’ gifts circulate in a community, wherein “the spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.”¹²⁶ Hyde prescribes, “Whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept.”¹²⁷ On this point and throughout his analysis, Hyde dictates a gifting ethic, distinguishing between true and false gifts.¹²⁸

Gifted art in Hyde’s romanticizing theory is described in terms of erotic “fertility.”¹²⁹ Gifted works, he writes, “circulate among us as reservoirs of available life.”¹³⁰ With this pregnant metaphor, Hyde foregrounds the production of art as continuously generative, motivated by eros. Art multiplies; gifts beget more gifts. As with biological reproduction, at least in its most romantic interpretation, the “sentiment” of the transaction is vital to the result.¹³¹ In the transcultural gifting myths that Hyde analyzes, the abundance of gifts ceases as soon as the gift’s value is calculated. After the calculation, self-interest and greed undermine the spirit of the gift, stunting its generativity. Moreover, the characters involved in gifting narratives are drawn into dramas in which a gift multiplies itself with the help of human interlopers. In other words, the gift, as Hyde presents it, assumes its own agency, reproducing copiously with the help of human bystanders. He explains, “Wherever property circulates as a gift, the increase that accompanies that circulation is simultaneously material, social, and spiritual; where wealth moves as a gift, any increase in material wealth is automatically accompanied by the increased conviviality of the group and the strengthening of the hau, the spirit of the gift.”¹³² In this process of increase, the gift is the central force (as spirit) and the outcome, in Hyde’s case primarily as art. Increase is a function of the virtue with which participants engage the gift.

A central tenet of Hyde’s gifting ethic is that true gifts are entirely distinguishable from commodities.¹³³ This is an illustration of his highly idealistic view of the gift’s function in creativity. To Hyde, art that is intended for market value does not remain a gift.¹³⁴ The artist who “hopes to market work that is the realization of his [sic] gifts cannot begin with the market. He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy.”¹³⁵ Whether art that is not a realization of any gift within the artist may begin with the market is unclear. Plausibly, such art is neither true nor a gift. To Hyde, the gift sphere and the market are incommensurate. Indeed, he characterizes this dichotomy along the distinct lines of eros and logos; the former is “unanalytical and undialectical,” whereas the latter is predicated on value assessment.¹³⁶ Logos is “the money of the mind [that] destroys the gift.”¹³⁷ Using Mauss’s notion of gifting in a circular exchange but rejecting the value management of its economic logic in a way that foreshadows Derrida (see next section), Hyde writes, “The gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being ‘all of a piece’ within the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part.”¹³⁸ The moment when an artist reflects cerebrally on a work of art in progress, the gifted materia is jeopardized, just as a gift loses its giftedness in the moment when market value is estimated. Awareness of the gift in art forecloses the possibility of both art and gift. In critical response to Hyde, my contention about the gifting logos is that it is possible to define logos as a “principle of differentiation,” as he does, but, instead of rejecting it, I insist on a connection between logos and gifting. Doing so enables an investigation on how symbolic differentiation brings together rhetorical invention and gifting.

Jacques Derrida: Always Already Annulled (1992)

To study the gift, if such a thing there be, Jacques Derrida deals in absolutes, wholly rejecting what most of us would call a gift. He offers an account that, perhaps consistent with Derridean deconstruction, contains much more information on what gifting is not than it does on what the true gift is. Most emphatically he argues that “gifts” in ordinary life are trapped by “common language and logic” in a structure of three: “A gives B to C.”¹³⁹ This structure, Derrida announces, is what produces “the annulment, the annihilation, the destruction of the gift.”¹⁴⁰ As soon as something is identifiable as a gift, the “giftedness” of that thing is destroyed.¹⁴¹ In that moment, debt dominates the exchange and the relationship of the parties. Expectations and norms of reciprocity creep in and destroy the purity of the potential gift. Writes Derrida: “From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, its sense, and its essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt.”¹⁴² The circle symbolizing the economics of the gift is anathema to Derrida’s gift, which must be understood as “aneconomic.”¹⁴³ Put another way, Derrida understands the gift as invaluable: infinitely precious but beyond evaluation. This makes his theory of gifting open to alternative definitions of value, which becomes useful in my later chapters.

In his essays on the gift, Derrida responds directly to Mauss, whom he accuses of “speak[ing] blithely” about gifts in a circle of exchange.¹⁴⁴ Mauss, he claims, “never asks the question as to whether gifts can remain gifts once they are exchanged; [nor] does [he] worry enough about this incompatibility between gift and exchange or about the fact that an exchanged gift is only a tit for tat, that is, an annulment of the gift.”¹⁴⁵ In Derrida’s view, all of Mauss’s ideas are complicit in the annulment of the gift: the potlatch, the transgressions, and the surpluses that manage the social hierarchies of “prestations.”¹⁴⁶ Derrida first addresses the complications of syntax and then the moment when Mauss “excuses” himself, which Derrida uses to pivot the argument to “the triple and indissociable question of the gift, of forgiveness, and of the excuse.”¹⁴⁷ With reference to syntax, Derrida asks, simply put, how a single word (such as “give” or “gift”) could mean so many different things.¹⁴⁸ Giving one’s word in the form of a promise, he suggests, cannot reasonably be grouped with other symbolic acts like giving a ring.¹⁴⁹ Relatedly, Derrida questions the extent to which the verb of giving actually couples with the noun gift in an intelligible way.¹⁵⁰ Finally, deconstructing the premises of Mauss’s project and targeting the argument that “evolved” societies ought to return to the gifting ethics of archaic societies, Derrida aptly characterizes Mauss’s agenda as a “Rousseauist schema.”¹⁵¹

The gift, a Derridean impossibility, takes place only on the condition of the exchange circle’s interruption.¹⁵² Derrida writes, “A gift could be possible, there could be a gift only at the instant an effraction in the circle will have taken place, at the instant all circulation will have been interrupted and on the condition of this instant.”¹⁵³ In this interruption, the madness of the gift sends nomos and logos into “crisis.”¹⁵⁴ Logic and reason, norms and culture, are infinitely exceeded when a gift is given that does not forge a structure of expectation and debt. With the notions of effraction and interruption, Derrida pursues something other than simple humility or altruism. He notes, “If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given the gift as a given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor).”¹⁵⁵ Derrida considers the possibility of a gift wherein giver and receiver are radically remote, separated from one another in anonymity. The gift is not recognized as such by either participant, and both forget the whole thing as soon as it happens.¹⁵⁶ Such a gift is not only boundless and immeasurable but impossible and untheorizable.¹⁵⁷ With the help of Heidegger, Derrida presents the gift as a giving event that overtakes all.¹⁵⁸ Doing so, he discounts those human practices in which participants interpret what they are doing as gifting, disallowing those practices as not-quite-good-enough-to-be-gifting, or worse, as delusional simulations. Nevertheless, his conclusions leave open the possibility that a gift could be a submission without expectation and without gratitude, rhetorically constituting a social form.

The Gift in Rhetorical Studies

The notion of a gift has long been subtly present in rhetorical studies, not only because gifts are messages, as I have noted, or because some rhetors are described as especially gifted, but because rhetoric, in Aristotle’s words, may be defined as discerning the available means of persuasion in any given situation. With this tacit acknowledgment of preexisting conditions in which events take place (or time—remember, “Rain rains”), rhetoricians are scholars of the gift, albeit implicitly. Moving toward a more explicit model, I submit that by rendering insights from the five thinkers discussed here, it is possible to build a specifically rhetorical theory of gifting. What I am interested in is the question, What happens rhetorically when a cultural practice is constructed by participants through the motifs of gifting? When rhetorical agents refer to something that they have or something that they are making as a gift, what does this mean? What about when they describe sharing their experiences as gifting, or when they talk about knowledge as a gift? This line of inquiry, as the reader will discover, runs through the three case studies of this book. Before proceeding to the section on the gifting logos and to the case studies themselves, however, I address directly two scholars whose works make the concept of the gift viable in rhetorical scholarship: Michael J. Hyde and Mari Lee Mifsud.

Rhetorician and bioethicist Michael J. Hyde offers an interpretation of acknowledgment as a life-giving gift that bestows upon another a dwelling place of ontological significance. Acknowledgment, Hyde writes, is “a form of consciousness that transforms time and space,” creating “a moral place of being-with-and-for-others.”¹⁵⁹ In The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement, Hyde traces the Judeo-Christian creation story alongside the scientific theory of a “big bang” explosion, claiming that both events extend a kind of “acknowledgment to Being.”¹⁶⁰ The first phase of the gift of acknowledgment, then, is to make room. From this initial moment, all subsequent, smaller-scale acknowledgments are possible. On this point—the idea that originary acknowledgment (from a divine or cosmic power) enables acknowledgment as gift giving among human beings (in the context of Dasein)—Hyde gets more compelling fodder from the Bible than from scientists. He references the creative function of language, noting that God “called us into being with a ‘Word’ [Logos] of acknowledgement that brought forth the truth of all that is. By way of this most glorious gift, God created the place wherein all other such gifts could be given by creatures with the capacity to do so.”¹⁶¹ This inaugural giving returns in chapter 4 in my analysis of how the Pirate Party, emerging in view of the commons, gives a political construct. The original gift of acknowledgment, according to which subsequent ones are modeled, begins with making.¹⁶²

The notion of the gift, as Hyde explains, reveals how “rhetoric and acknowledgement go hand in hand.”¹⁶³ In the study of public address, audiences are not remote variables of the rhetorical situation but must be “acknowledged, engaged, and called into the space of practical concerns.”¹⁶⁴ Hyde’s rhetor offers acknowledgment as a gift that he or she is able to give against the odds of being, which is always already precarious. Hyde writes:

Acknowledgement is a moral action that in its most positive mode is dedicated to making time and space for the disclosing of truth. Appropriateness helps to facilitate this action by lending itself to the rhetorical task of creating dwelling places wherein people can collaborate about and know together matters of importance. Human beings are gifted with the potential for developing the capacity to perform such an artistic and moral feat.¹⁶⁵

Here the gift is not just an acknowledgment extended by the rhetor to another person but the potency that the rhetor possesses. Via the notion of a gift, Hyde identifies “rhetorical competence” as “essential for our social well-being.”¹⁶⁶

Mari Lee Mifsud in Rhetoric and the Gift likewise interprets the gift as presented by a call from something Other and adds to this the more mundane habits in which gifts are human necessities. Mifsud’s theory of the rhetorical gift, in other words, is dual, at once profoundly excessive and pragmatic. First, rhetoric as a gift that exceeds figuration is “outside the system of exchange altogether, beyond exchangist figures.”¹⁶⁷ The call demands a response, which gives rise to figuration and to rhetoric. It is a gift to be called, Mifsud argues, as Aristotle was called by Homer. The former’s works are full of invocations and references to Homeric poetry; these references, cataloged by Mifsud in a sort of re-performance of Homer’s and Aristotle’s gifting, amount to poesis in rhetorike. Second, on the more technical level, the “level of the artful response,” rhetoric concerns itself with gifts more readily understood as cultural inheritance.¹⁶⁸ Aristotle’s theory relies substantively and stylistically on such inheritances, as does any ordinary exchange between friends that starts with “Well, you know what they say.” The elegance of Mifsud’s project is how she traces the movement of the gift from the pre-techne call to the “art-full” system of figuration. She is explicitly set on how “the gift we get on the other side of the gift’s having gone through the technical apparatus is something quite different than the gift had been” under circumstances “not amenable to figuration.”¹⁶⁹

In Mifsud’s analysis of Aristotle’s rhetorical theory, the deliverer of gifts is Homer, who “gives the sublime to the civic.”¹⁷⁰ As a function of his gift giving (i.e., the call from the “imaginative, inventive, and ingenious” muse-cum-patriarch), Aristotle is capable of formulating the precepts that still nourish rhetoricians.¹⁷¹ Further, the Homeric themes of gift giving that structures human relationships and interactions inform Aristotle’s poetic scenes and dramas.¹⁷² Homer’s gift is settled into Aristotle’s text topically and metaphorically. Further still, Aristotle’s Homeric references make manifest the givens of the cultural history that unites the two Greeks and the givens of the cultural context to which Aristotle’s audience belongs. As Mifsud explains, “By ‘givens,’ I mean to call attention to the performance of the Homeric gift transformed into the doxa of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The doxa are ‘generally accepted principles’ derived from the beliefs of a people that all or a majority or the wise accept.”¹⁷³ These principles are taken for granted—a potent phrase in this context—as appropriate and self-evident without further explanation. As gifts, they are, Mifsud argues, haplous, or without the need for qualifying remarks.¹⁷⁴ In order to mentally conflate doxastic principles and gifts, readers might think both about whatever “truths we hold to be self-evident” and whatever presents are handed over pro forma at a dinner party (flowers, a bottle of wine, etc.). They are simply that they are; they are a given. Being able to wield them competently, in Mifsud’s words to practice them as a rhetorical art, is a sign of cultural viability.

Within Mifsud’s framework, gifts are both material and “animistic” in a way that obligates recipients to respond.¹⁷⁵ To describe gifts as material, Mifsud emphasizes how “aggregation guides relations in the gift economy.”¹⁷⁶ Gifts tend toward their own multiplication and reproduction. Mifsud oscillates back and forth across the line that separates one gift from another, or a gifted symbol from a gifted thing, or an initial gift from a reciprocal one, noting “multiple and divergent things can be seen as touching.”¹⁷⁷ The “animistic quality,” then, is an indication that the given material that tends toward its own aggregation “is not inactive” but indeed active and effectual.¹⁷⁸ The gift, to simplify, must be understood as both tangible stuff and intentional in its own right. Reflecting on this insight, Mifsud’s reader might turn to her conclusions about Aristotle’s relation to Homer, which deploy the aforementioned dual notion of the gift and posit a sacrifice. Aristotle sacrifices Homer, Mifsud argues, insofar as he gives up on gifting ethics in favor of the prudential rhetoric of the polis. As the epic dramas of Homer’s world are translated and condensed for the managerial purposes of everyday life, poesis is dehydrated into civic judgment.¹⁷⁹ The polis demands rhetoric as a techne; song has no business in the polis, Mifsud laments. And although Mifsud insists that she is not attempting a corrective on Homer’s behalf, her sanguine gifting theory of rhetoric suggests otherwise. Refusing to sacrifice Homer as though on a patricidal pyre of political necessity, we “need not continue to make the same choices” as Aristotle does in his appropriation of the gift.¹⁸⁰ Mifsud promises an alternative, a theory and praxis of the rhetorical gift that supplies “resources for resisting tyranny.”¹⁸¹ More than a call (of conscience, as Hyde would have it), the gift is full of potential; the recipient’s task is to manage the proliferation of the gift’s materiality without squelching the animus of excessive generosity with which the gift arrives.

Both Hyde and Mifsud provide ways of understanding the gift as rhetorical; in so doing, their work is indispensable to my project. And yet I am troubled by the way that both scholars isolate the gift from the complications of human conduct. To them, the gift is principally an a priori circumstance, expressed by the grace (or call) of God, Homer, or Aristotle. By extension it may be given among rhetorical agents in particular actions, but only insofar as these agents are capable of something as existentially noble as responding, “Here I am!” Neither Hyde’s nor Mifsud’s insightful work dedicates attention to the human practices that situate gifting inside ordinary experience. My ambition is to present a theory of the gifting logos, relying via Heraclitus on the multilevel meanings of logos to examine not only the noble but the quotidian. Conceptually adding logos to gifting in this way allows me to approach the gift as rhetorical, as integral to symbolic practices. By now I have sufficiently emphasized my assumption that gifts are messages. Specifically, the gifting logos accounts for the production and circulation of epistemic materials in the networked context of the digital commons. By arguing that digital commoners engage with discourses of expertise via the gifting logos, I am grounding Hyde’s and Mifsud’s works in everyday rhetorical life.

A distinctly rhetorical perspective on the gift does not buckle under the weight of romantic idealism. I am convinced that this perspective is valuable insofar as it is more attuned to what people claim to be doing than what they may be said to be doing according to an absolute standard. Most gifting theory is full of absolutes. In Ralph W. Emerson’s poetic imagination, for example, “The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. [. . .] Thou must bleed for me.”¹⁸² As beautiful as Emerson’s portrayal is, I am compelled to ask whether the kinds of gifts that he describes are the only ones that count, and if so, why. What insights might be gained by choosing not to disqualify nonbleeding instances of gifting as inadequate? Christina M. Geschwandtner suggests:

While a kenotic and self-sacrificial love, a purely gratuitous and entirely unselfish gift, a devoted and pure appreciation of art, or a profound sense of the utter uniqueness of each historical and cultural event may be the ideals, surely they cannot be the exclusive paradigms for all love, all gifts, all art, all events without thereby implying that all less extreme versions immediately collapse into objectivity and certainty.¹⁸³

Sharing Geschwandtner’s interest in gifts and events beyond the “purely gratuitous and entirely unselfish,” I might add that mundane gifting is not necessarily trivial. Gifting may be, as I suggest, a rhetorical way of making sense of something, a logos. John McAteer, positing a “third kind of gift” in between absolute grace and a stick of gum, proposes that “we think of gift as communion where what is given is the gift of being-with-the-other.”¹⁸⁴ This Heideggerian tack has considerable potential, even if McAteer’s Christian ethics are bracketed. From this vantage point, we might see the event of being-together as a given, indeed a condition of what is common.

THE GIFTING LOGOS

The gifting logos is the epistemic rhetoric of the digital commons whereby knowing and making become integrated practices of everyday life, thematized as gifting. The purpose of this book is to present a theory of how this logos functions as expertise. At the beginning of this chapter, I stated that expertise is knowledge living its rhetorical life. In the present historical moment, this life is intensely focused on the production of interpretations of everyday experiences. Expertise is thus the production of digital stuff that captures the lived experiences of networked commoners. The gifting logos affords the commoners a rhetorical activity that configures them as a networked multitude. In a continuous process of invention, the knowledges and experiences of the multitude are digitized, and through the continuous process of circulation, the digitized stuff is constituted as a gift. The making and knowing of the multitude are inextricably linked, and the language of gifting supplies the link. To be clear, the issue at stake in my project is not whether the digital multitude is really giving away knowledge, art, or other materials free of charge, nor is it whether digital commoners are authentically generous or altruistic. Instead, the question is: What are the characteristics and functions of the gifting logos as a rhetorical habit? As a rhetoric of expertise, how does it integrate making, knowing, and gifting? I foreshadow the conclusion chapter by briefly introducing here five prevalent features of the gifting logos; I return to these in more detail following the case studies.

The gifting logos assumes participants’ awareness in order to function.

The gifting logos places significant emphasis on the intentionality of those who engage one another through the message of a gift. Its ordering of knowing-and-making activities in the digital commons becomes most distinct when commoners articulate a kind of informal theory of what they are doing. As is evident in the section on gifting theory, the motives of those who give and receive gift-messages are central not only to their relationship but also to the health of the social system around them. Successful gifting happens in the context of mutual recognition. In rhetoric, the counterpart of intent is agency, a fraught notion that questions how rhetorical agents intervene in particular situations so as to exert influence over the behaviors and beliefs of others. Rhetorical agency and intentionality are recurring points of scholarly contention precisely because they push the question of humans’ impact on their context, indeed their awareness thereof. With respect to this contention, I offer additional nuance to this feature of the gifting logos in chapter 5.

Emphasizing intent, the gifting logos makes entry into the networks of the digital commons a matter of active participation. Moreover, awareness of one’s participation in the gifting logos becomes a strategy for maintaining the integrity of one’s network node with respect to future uncertainty. The productive interactions of the digital commoners are predicated to some degree on the idea that their fully conscious decisions lead to a future for the digital commons that is consistent with individual choices and that those choices may be fixed in digital form. This is not to say that the gifting logos never makes room for those who produce and circulate cultural materials without active use of the gift concept. Circulating material can function as epistemic gift-stuff to some degree even without gifters’ or receivers’ explicit recognition of their materials’ impact. Still, the contours of the gifting logos emerge most visibly as digital commoners construct their knowing and making practices as expertise-as-gift.

The gifting logos derives rhetorical potency from tensions between artifice and nature.

The gifting logos thrives on the tension between, on the one hand, the idea that knowing-making-gifting happens naturally in the commons, and, on the other hand, the idea that commoners must intentionally codify this practice. So it is that the resources of the digital commons, the stuff that the commoners use and invent, are constructed through the gifting logos as both natural and artificial, or, as I demonstrate in chapter 4, as both a matter of access to nature and a state of political governance. Relatedly, in the rhetorical processes of expertise, the natural and artificial are oriented in relation to the familiar and the unfamiliar. Expertise is the making sense of something for others to consider. To make something unnatural seem necessary and natural (such as access to a broadband infrastructure or digitized music) is to make it natural or to rhetorically give it over to an audience in a natural form. To transform something mysterious into something familiar is to make it knowable. Conversely, to make something like silicon and metal wiring into a mystery is a matter of rhetorical epistemology. The gifting logos as expertise thus wields the rhetorical tension between nature and artifice.

The gifting logos is abundant.

The gifting logos as a rhetoric of expertise values quantity and the promiscuous replication of “stuff.” “Lots and lots” is the motif of the gifting logos; to have lots is to know lots, according to the discourses of expertise in the digital commons. The bigger the data, the better the expertise. In the abundant digital networks of the commons, delivery and access are thus fully wedded; any and all things that circulate in the networks to which commoners have access are entirely assessible (access-able) to them. Expertise, measured in bulk, functions such that the more of it that is delivered to nodes in the network, the more of it the nodes can absorb. On this point, the gifting logos aligns with the history of rhetoric in which copia has been associated with expertise and knowledge, specifically how expressions may be multiplied so that a subject may be fully understood. A subject is made knowable through repetition that produces an abundant result. In digital networks, the scale and speed of copia are distinguishable from more traditional forms of repetition. With speed and scope operating in tandem, the abundance of digital “stuff” effectively becomes immersive, a substance mediating between digital commoners.

The gifting logos is time sensitive and progressivist.

Because it is a rhetorical practice, the gifting logos is necessarily time sensitive, attuned to kairotic moments of appropriate intervention. Further, because it is a gifting practice, timing is everything; timing enables a meaningful gift. For example, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, time variously constrains the gifting logos as productive expertise via the structure of copyright, which dictates that the ownership privileges of expertise are contingent on time. The basic tenet of copyright is that those who create materials are entitled to enjoy the benefits of their creation for a limited time. Expertise as content is thus timed. Adding another layer, the gifting logos manages time-as-history, indeed makes time, through the retrieval technology of digital archiving. The Wayback Machine, as I demonstrate in chapter 3, gives the past of the digital commons to the commoners, making digitized history knowable. Finally, the time sensitivity of the giving logos is set to “urgent”; digital commoners are called, for example by the Pirate Party in chapter 4, to act quickly in order to ensure a happy and prosperous future. Via the gifting logos, expertise refers both to making history knowable (accessible via a screen) and to the historical progress of technologies that serve networks of the commons.¹⁸⁵

The gifting logos assumes a rhetorically playful posture toward its “others.”

Unlike the serious affect that characterizes traditional expertise, enabling experts to be taken seriously as such, the gifting logos often operates in a playful and irreverent mode. It is a rhetorical epistemic habit that distinguishes itself from other epistemic habits and hierarchies by being un-serious. In so doing, it facilitates critique of these others via comic subversion and parody. Whereas traditional politicians are serious, for example, the Pirate Party is deliberately unconventional and, for lack of a better word, cool. Whereas copyright law is dull and antiquated, the Creative Commons is agile and cutting edge, giving the commons access to information and pop culture. Whereas brick-and-mortar archives and archivists are dusty institutional holdovers from another era, the Wayback Machine is a whimsically named technology for time travel. In each case, the rhetorical posture of not taking oneself too seriously frames expertise, allowing it to function in ways that traditional conditions would preclude. This posture, I argue in the conclusion, disarms two sets of questions that confront expertise in the twenty-first century. First, are the habits that function as expertise in the digital commons recognizable by that term from a traditional perspective on productive epistemology? Are they really expertise? Second, does rhetorically constructing an activity as a gifting activity make it so? Can knowing and making be effectively integrated with gifting, or is the latter a façade for something else entirely? The networked expertise of the digital commons depends on that of the gifting logos’ to critique but also to destabilize traditional expertise and its authority.